Over that same time period, I gained 725 Twitter followers, sent 56 people to my site from that link (7.7% CTR), and got additional shares on the article. I also built relationships along the way:

(People thanked me for showing the article to them.)

(And joined my email list!)

This passive traffic system takes about 5 minutes to set up, and with the dead simple strategy I’m going to show you to get more free Twitter followers, you will be killing multiple birds with one stone.

Here’s how to set up a Twitter automatic DM and drive traffic with it:

There are a bunch of services that allow you to set up automatic DMs, but my favorite free one is Crowdfire.

First, head over to Crowdfire and set up your account. Then click on “Automate” in the left sidebar.

It should be on the “DM Marketing” tab already. If not, go to that tab.

Here you can set up just one direct message, or you can set up multiple messages that get cycled randomly to your new followers. Here’s what mine looks like:

Now, this next part is crucial. You want to provide value with your DM, while making your automated message seem less “automatic.”

Here are some basic principles to follow with your DM:

Most people don’t want to be sold to in a Twitter message, so try not to promote your products/services.

Link to something that will provide a ton of free value to them.

Frame the message as if you checked out their profile beforehand and thought they might like what you’re about to show them.

Unless your service lets you include a first name field for your follower, don’t say “Hi” or “Hey there.” Saying “Hi” without stating their name reinforces that it’s an automated message, so it’s better to leave it out.

Respond to the people who respond back to you. Build relationships.

Ba da bing, ba da boom! Your automated message is set up.

Now you just need one more thing:

More Twitter followers.

How do you get more followers on Twitter? Well, luckily, one of my favorite bloggers, Robbie Richards, shared a brilliant strategy to get more followers.

It takes about 10 minutes a day and it’s dead simple.

Over a 16-day period, I grew my Twitter following by 792 people. This strategy gives you immense power over the effectiveness of your DM for driving traffic.

P.S. Robbie used this strategy to get 1,048 new followers and increase his Twitter referral traffic by 159% (with 3 hours of work).

Instead of breaking down the strategy, I’ll let Robbie do the talking:

2. Powerful Outreach Strategies

Reaching out to people for social shares and engagement is one of the best ways to get traffic to your site.

As long as your content is valuable enough, people will be happy that you exposed them to the information you put together.

There are also ways to make sure these people are pre-qualified to want and need your content.

Here’s how to do it:

1) Reach out to influencers you have mentioned

People love being featured. Influencers are no different.

If you’ve created a valuable piece of content, odds are you’ve linked out to other helpful resources produced by people with large followings.

Reach out to these people and let them know you’ve included them.

Why?

Well for one, giving them a heads up is a nice thing to do. For two, them sharing your content will get more eyeballs on it, which means more eyeballs on the link to their site and more traffic for them. Win-win.

When you mention influencers in your content, reach out to them with an email like this:

Subject: New lead gen guide, you’re included

Hey NAME,

I just published a new lead generation tutorial that breaks down 17 ways to capture targeted leads online.

I included your guide, The Ultimate Guide to Landing Page Design, in the part about creating high converting landing pages. It’s an amazing resource that I think my readers will get a ton of value from :).

Anyway, just wanted to give you a heads up that I featured you in my article. Feel free to check it out here: URL

Have a good one!

YOUR NAME

Short, sweet, and to the point. You also have the option of asking them to share the article. Just say something like this:

“I know you must be busy, but if you have the time, would you mind sharing it on social media?”

If you’ve created a valuable resource, they will probably share it without you asking.

But if you’re in a niche where influencers aren’t getting a lot of these requests, you might want to ask for one. This is so they know exactly what you would like them to do.

2) Reach out to other influencers in your niche

For this one, you’re going to do the same as before except you haven’t mentioned them in your content.

The goal is to find influencers who will have an interest in your content, whether they’re featured or not.

Filter your list and choose only those you think may be interested in your post.

Remember, if they wrote something similar to your post, then that’s a good indicator that it may interest them.

You can create a list within the tool and when you have transferred all your prospects to that list, head over to Outreach Mode and send them this templates:

(Or contact them on Twitter.)

Then fire off an email like this:

Subject: An article you might like

Hey NAME,

I just published a new lead generation tutorial that breaks down 17 ways to capture targeted leads online.

I noticed that most of the information out there hadn’t been updated in a while, so I made sure to make this piece as in-depth and actionable as possible.

As a small business owner, I thought you might like to check it out: URL

Anyway, just wanted to give you a heads up. If you have the time, would you mind sharing it on social media for me?

Have a good one!

YOUR NAME

With this email, you can be a little more forward and ask for a share (unless you’re reaching out to more influencers). These people probably don’t get share requests that often, so asking for one doesn’t come off too pushy.

BOOM!

There you have it.

3 powerful outreach strategies to get you tons of social shares, engagement, and visitors.

I first read an article like this on The Start of Happiness. It’s a list of the top 100 self-improvement blogs of 2014, ranked by Alexa ranking. I immediately noticed that it got over 2,000 shares on social media:

These articles offer many benefits:

They help you build relationships, because you’re featuring other sites/people and giving them recognition.

They’re quick and painless to create.

They are inherently shareable and easy to promote.

Re-read that last one.

These articles are some of the easiest to promote, get hundreds (if not thousands) of social shares, and drive free website traffic by the truckload.

My client and I used a top X article to get our highest traffic day at the time and over 200 shares in a niche where social media isn’t a big part of the landscape yet.

8. Harness The Power of Subreddits

Reddit is a treasure trove of discussions, ideas, and information. It’s broken up into subreddits based on different interests.

These subreddits are where discussions are held and where content is shared. You’ll find thousands of people congregating in these areas on the web.

Just like LinkedIn groups, you can harness subreddits to drive free traffic to your site.

First, stroll over to the Reddit home page. Click on “Edit>>” in the top right:

In the search bar that says “search for subreddits by name,” search for keywords related to your niche/industry.

This will bring up a list of subreddits to choose from.

Pick a subreddit, open it in a new tab, and check it out. Make sure it’s an active subreddit that’s worth your time.

To do this, look at the number of subscribers.

If a lot of people subscribe to the subreddit, it has potential to send visitors your way.

Next, look at the types of content and discussions going on. Redditors are protective of their territory. They won’t give any love (or clicks) to topics and content that are off-topic and solely for self-promotion.

The key is making sure your content is highly relevant to what that subreddit is discussing or is interested in.

Next, just submit a new link or discussion (with a link to your content).

Rinse and repeat this for as many subreddits as you like. If people like what you have shared, your content will get upvoted. This gives it more exposure and attracts more clicks to your website.

9. Leverage Your Email List for Traffic and Shares

It happens time and time again:

People publish a piece of content, share it on social media, get a few trickles of traffic, but completely neglect their #1 fans:

Their email list.

Who are these people? They’re people who have subscribed to your blog or downloaded your free resource because they want to hear more from you.

If you continue producing stellar content, they want to promote you and spread the word.

But if you’re not engaging them, these people are just sitting there.

Don’t make this mistake.

When you produce an amazing piece of content, send it to your email list.

While this immediate traffic aren’t “new visitors,” they’re people who will share your content, link to you, and help you bring in new visitors.

They’re your strongest promotors.

Don’t ignore them.

10. Optimize Your Lead Magnets for Social Sharing

Lead magnets are great:

They’re valuable pieces of information

They help you capture leads and build your email list

And they’re easy to create

However, there’s a way for you to squeeze even more value out of them. Not only that, but your lead magnets can actually help you gradually build your web traffic over time.

How?

By optimizing them to be shared on social media:

First, make sure you have a landing page ready for your lead magnet. Here are a few examples:

Then go to sharelinkgenerator.com. This tool let’s you create custom share links for any of the 5 main social networks.

All of the networks (except for Pinterest) will take your featured image as the image.

For Facebook and Google plus, it will pull information from your meta description for the description.

For Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest, you can create a custom tweet/title and description.

Next, input the landing page link and the information it asks for. The tool will then generate a custom share link. Go ahead and test out the link to make sure it works.

You can include this link anywhere in your lead magnet, but I prefer to do it like this:

Head over to Iconfinder. Grab a social media icon for each link you generated.

Place these icons in each page of your lead magnet, link them with the share URLs, and include a call-to-action to share it.

This means that anyone who downloads your lead magnet has the potential to share it on social media, drive traffic to your landing page, and build your email list.

How’s that for passive promotion?

11. Content Syndication

What if every article you publish gets sent to a publication that already attracts a lot of traffic (with links back to your site)?

You’d get immediate exposure without having to put in extra work each time you publish new content.

Well, it’s 100% possible with content syndication.

“Content syndication is the process of pushing your blog, site, or video content out into third-party sites, either as a full article, snippet, link, or thumbnail.

The idea is to drive more engagement with your content by wiring it into related digital contexts, either to boost traffic to your owned property or just get exposure for your brand or your key personalities or products.” — Andrew Delamarter, Search Engine Watch

The more places you can syndicate your content, the more exposure (traffic) you can get to each piece.

These articles are based around one defining question that lots of people would like to know the answer to. The publisher then reaches out to experts in the field to get their opinion.

Finally, all of these opinions get combined into one, meaty, extremely valuable article that people LOVE.

But here’s the thing:

These articles are special. Expert roundups are inherently easy to promote and drive traffic to.

Why?

Because the people you’re featuring are influencers in the space. They have large followings.

Once you gather these answers, promotion is as easy as sending the completed article to them and/or asking them to share it for you. Most of the time, they’ll be happy to do it.

And the more experts you feature, the more potential traffic you can drive.

Got it?

Great.

Let’s learn how to create an expert roundup:

The most important part of an expert roundup is the question. If you don’t get this right, experts won’t answer you. They’re simply too busy to spend time on things that aren’t meaningful, even if it does get them more exposure.

So spend some time researching your question. I like to start off with keyword research to come up with a question.

Next, pull together as large a list of professionals as you can. If you’re in a niche with lots of influencers, pick and choose the ones you like the most (and who have the biggest followings).

If you’re not in an influencer-heavy niche, grab all of the top influencers and simply go down the list to less influential people. Again, the more the merrier.

Then, it’s time to reach out to each person with your question.

Subject: Expert roundup

Hey NAME,

I’m writing because I’m putting together a NICHE expert roundup for my blog, and I was wondering if you would like to participate. Here’s the topic:

“QUESTION”

With your expertise in the field, I think readers would love to get your opinion.

Of course, I’ll include a picture of you (or your logo) and link back to WEBSITE NAME and your social media profiles.

Hope to have you on board.

All the best,

YOUR NAME

When the answers start rolling in, make sure to thank each person for their time and compile the answers into an article. Include a picture, the response, and any relevant links.

The process of uploading a presentation is straightforward, but here are some tips to keep in mind:

Make your presentation 800X600 (or 10.67in by 8in) to fit in the SlideShare screen with no black edges. (Thank you, Ana Hoffman.)

Include clickable links and images (with CTAs) in your PowerPoint presentations. Make sure your links are in the center of the slides, because SlideShare reserves the left and right areas for people to click forward and backward in the presentation. This HubSpot article notes that if you put your links on the sides, they won’t work. Keep them in the middle part.

SlideShare doesn’t allow links in the first three slides, so put them on the fourth slide and beyond.

You can’t include live links in the description, so paste your URL in there with a call to action.

To maximize view potential, this article says to upload your presentations at 11PM EST (8PM PT). This way, it’s uploaded right after SlideShare changes its Top Presentation of the Day, and you have 20 or so hours to collect views and possibly get featured.

Include clickable social icons on the last slide to share your presentation.

Google can crawl the transcript that’s displayed below your presentation, so optimize your presentation like you would any other page or blog post. Keywords in the title, body, etc.

HubSpot says to disable SlideShare’s option for viewers to download your presentation as a PDF. That way, their only option to get more information is to follow the CTA to your website.

Ana Hoffman also notes that you can re-upload your presentations if you notice a spelling mistake, want to change your CTA, or make any other changes. You won’t lose your views, settings, etc.

Simply take the main points of your blog post, put them into a clean presentation, and upload it to SlideShare.

Then promote the presentation exactly like you would a blog post.

2) Turn Your Presentation Into a Youtube Video

This one is simple.

Simply take the presentation you made, spruce it up with background music or a narrator, and upload it to Youtube. There’s your video.

3) Turn Your Presentation Into a Webinar

Webinars almost always involve slides of some kind. They’re easy to follow and they help attendees retain the information.

You’ve already got your slides ready to go. You know the information. Now all you have to do is promote your webinar and get people on there.

Combine this with a special offer at the end and you could generate leads and close sales as well.

4) Turn Your Blog Post Into an Infographic

Infographics are great. You can learn a lot in a short amount of time and they’re highly shareable.

Usually, the only thing you’re missing to create one is the information. Lucky for you, since you wrote your blog post you already have the information.

Now you just have to create one or pay someone to do it for you. If you’d like to pay someone, head over to Elance or a related service.

If you’d like to create an infographic, I personally love Canva for all of my custom image needs.

15. Google+ Communities

They’re collections of people who discuss and share content about a certain topic.

If you’re creating amazingly useful content that these people will love, you’re doing them a disservice by not posting it in these communities.

So here’s how to do it:

First, head over to Google+. Hover over the “Home” icon and select “Communities” from the dropdown menu:

In the box where it says “Search for communities” type in your niche or a keyword related to your content and hit “Enter.”

This will bring up a list of communities related to what you do. Join all of the ones that apply.

Next, head into one of these communities, check out the discussions going on, and decide if your content would be a good fit.

Here’s why you want to be picky:

When you share something in a community, it shows up on your profile as well. So if you post the article in 5 communities immediately, it shows up on your profile 5 times in a row.

This looks spammy and can deter people from following you and clicking to your website.

To avoid this, you want to pick the best fitting community first and share your content there. Then, a few days or a week later, when you have some more posts on your profile, share it in a different community.

Be picky and move from the best down. Then rinse and repeat this process to bring in consistent traffic.

16. Quora — A Little-Known Long Term Source of Traffic

Quora is a Q&A site.

(Like Yahoo Answers, but more modern.)

People are constantly asking questions and providing answers to every topic under the sun.

Each question starts a thread, and these threads can stay active for months (and sometimes years).

They continue to get views. They continue to attract new answers.

And they can continue to send traffic your way for the life of the thread.

That’s Quora’s hidden traffic generation power.

Take a look at these stats from one of my clients:

Quora is our second highest source of social media traffic and our fourth highest overall.

But here’s the thing:

We haven’t done any active traffic gen on Quora in the last 2 months. Yet it continues to bring in visitors every single day.

This also means that the more you implement the strategy I’m about to teach you, the more your traffic will grow exponentially.

You can’t say that about many other traffic sources.

Let’s learn how to do it:

First, head over to Quora and create an account. Beef it up with the topics you’re an expert in, a bio, your description, etc.

Find the search bar and enter in a keyword related to your content, products, services — whatever you want to promote. (Note: Content works best because you’re providing free value.)

Go through the threads and give in-depth answers to people’s questions. The more value you provide, the more they’ll trust your expertise.

At the end of your question, simply link to a place on your site where they can get more information. It could be a piece of content. It could be a product page. Anywhere they can read more about what you’re discussing.

Here’s an example:

Notice how I lead into my content as a natural place to get more info? That’s what you want to do.

Simply rinse and repeat this for as many answers as you like. Always genuinely help them with their problems and present your content as the ultimate solution.

Blogtrottr allows you to set up an email alert that notifies you every time a blog publishes an article — as soon as it’s published.

First, create an account so you can set up multiple feeds. Then click on “Subscribe to a new feed.”

Next, you want to find the RSS feed URL for each site on your list. To do this, go to one of the sites, add “/rss” or “/feed” (no quotations) after the URL, and hit enter. This will usually redirect you to their RSS feed.

Grab the URL for that page and enter it into Blogtrottr. Set the schedule to “Real Time” so it emails you the moment a new post enters that feed.

After that, you should be good to go!

This will set it up so you never miss a blog post. They will arrive in your inbox ASAP so you can leave one of the first comments.

Now, when these opportunities enter your inbox, head over there as quick as possible.

Read through the article and leave an in-depth and insightful comment. Don’t just say “nice article.”

Remember: You want click-throughs to your site.

You want to blow people away with the knowledge you’re dropping. This will also help you stand out to the blogger, and if you end up leaving a relevant link to your site in the comment, it will have a much higher likelihood of being approved.

That’s it!

The more you do this, the more traffic you will drive.

But what if you don’t make it in time to be one of the first comments?

Here’s a sneaky trick:

Just reply to one of the first comments.

20. Host a Forum on Your Site

Forums get a TON of traffic.

They provide a sense of community and offer a valuable place to learn and get help from other people. It’s no wonder they’re some of the highest trafficked sites on the web.

You can grab some of this traffic for yourself by hosting your own forum.

Especially if you’re in a unique niche (or are presenting yourself as a unique part of that niche), this can be a great way to keep people on your site longer and spread the word about who you are.

The only question is, how do you set one up?

One of my favorite bloggers, Matthew Woodward, put together a fantastic step-by-step tutorial on how to do this.

Any questions or comments about these strategies? Let me know in the comments below.

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Michael Karp

Michael started Copytactics to help people grow their businesses online, using the exact same strategies he uses to grow his own.
Not only that, but he wants to show people how to impact lives with their business at the same time.
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I would like to thank Michael for this AMAZING post. There are too many internet marketers out there struggling to get traffic. How many people out there with mind-blowing websites that the world NEEDS that will never get enough traffic to get their ideas out to the public? How many people stuck at 9 to 5’s struggling to make money online only because they just CAN’T GET TRAFFIC? This is an extremely thoughtful post. The world needs more people who would create an article like this that could help the struggling moms out there trying to make money online.

This article has helped me A LOT. You see, I’m starting a new venture. This is the first venture of mine where I will be really trying to drive good free traffic. I never really tried before. This new venture (site) is ‘the one’. It literally HAS to work if I can get enough quality, targeted traffic to it, and this site could make BILLIONS. So what I am looking for is high quality, PERMANENT (no work needed to maintain – long term – hands-free), targeted, free traffic, and this article has laid out some of these types of traffic sources. Some very good ones.

High quality, permanent, targeted free traffic is the best type of traffic you could get. It’s hands free and pure ROI. So I highly recommend that anyone reading who needs traffic look into it. Some good high quality, permanent, targeted, free traffic sources you could use are number one, BaLooZo ( http://baloozo.com/get-instant-autopilot-targeted-website-traffic.html ), an ad site where you could post a permanent ad and push it to the top of the search results for your keywords and your category’s page 10 times a day, and there are advanced ad statistics. There are also feature PPC ads that go on top of the free ads that you could bid on for the first position, with a $0.001 load minimum and a $0.001 click minimum, in case you want to eventually pay for traffic, as well. You just sign up, post a permanent free ad and you’re getting permanent, free traffic forever.

Number two is http://flickr.com, a photo sharing site. To get traffic with this site you have to create interesting, niche targeted images or take interesting niche targeted photos or screenshots, sign up, upload the photos using proper tags (keywords) to make the traffic targeted, and say in the description of the photo: “Feel free to use this image, but give credits to http://www.yourwebsite.com.”, and then you’re getting permanent, targeted, free traffic forever from people sharing your photos and crediting your link.

Thanks a lot, Michael. You really don’t know what this means for me and how much you’ve just helped me.

Does anyone know any other ways I could get permanent, targeted, free traffic? I would be ever-thankful if you could share one with me.

Hi Michael, I love your article and your ideas and because of this I wondered if you could help me? I too have a small budget (for you if you can help!) I set up my online uk family travel business when I became seriously ill and work on my own. I have very limited time purely because being poorly, I can’t concentrate for very long and some days can’t work at all. Do you offer some sort of website review service? For example what I am doing wrong on my website marketing & SEO, what I am doing right and what I should focus on. I am trying to run the business to keep my mind busy (I used to be clever!) And earn enough money to maintain some independence without having to ask my lovely husband for handouts. I’m doing my best but not sure it’s good enough & I know I need some direction as I’m trying to be all things to all men! But at the same time I don’t want to be “burned” and want to spend my budget on someone I respect, that’s you by the way! Thx for listening and I look forward to hearing back.

I’ve experienced the power of communities. A few months ago I started a blog that had zero traffic. My first article was submitted to inbound.org and this gave it lots of exposure, traffic and social shares.

The article mentioned some influencers. I reached out to them & one of these influencers (Lincoln Murphy) submitted it to Inbound. Then, the article got a lot of traction.

In retrospect, it was key that an influencer submitted it. Had I submitted the article myself, It probably would not have gotten anywhere since I was new at the community. So this was key. But in order for an influencer to submit it, the content must be really outstanding.

Since then I started to love this community. As a matter of fact I just arrived here from Inbound. I read the article, loved it, shared it and commented on it … so another proof it works!

That’s funny, because that’s exactly what happened with this article. Someone more influential than me shared it, and other influencers upvoted it, which gave the article a lot more credibility than if I had uploaded it myself.

So there are definitely nuances that make each of these tactics more or less effective.

This post is amazing, Michael. It’s not a post—it’s a full course in the latest traffic generation tools, that I will have to sit down and study for weeks! You’ve given us so many powerful strategies and I can’t wait to start implementing some of them. If your readers begin using even one of these techniques/tools, they will be growing their business exponentially. I will definitely be sharing this post with my networks.

I must admit, I rarely take the time to stop and comment on something I read online but…..just wow. What a great post.

I think for me the key difference between this and other stuff I’ve read is how highly actionable everything us, with great examples of how they work in practice. I’m actually sunning myself on holiday at the moment, now I can’t wait to get back and start implementing.

I’ve started curating my favourite (mostly free) design resources from across the web at my new site Technifique.com and this will really help me start growing traffic to it.

Hi Michael,
Founded your site from Warrior Forum!!
Really what a Fantastic article, umm… not article but course!
Definitely, i agree with you, all if traffic are free!
I am also getting awesome traffic from google+ and twitter.
Really, to get traffic we need to engage readers by providing valuable content.

I have more or less worked on all the strategies except creating a content of top 100 blogs/ speakers! And in my experience what works best for me is – Reaching out to Influencers, Emailing to related authors, Emailing to the list & Promoting on Social Media Group.

Reddit is also a gem but the engagement that we receive is super low! [We get the traffic but not the type of traffic we want, hence started to not to promote well there]

Quora,
I should re-start spending more time quora! But then in my niche – Web Analytics – we have less questions! 🙁

Infographics work great for building traffic and authority. Recently I used Brian Dean’s guestographics formula and ended up with 2k social media shares, over 50 backlinks to a single blog post. That’s my favorite. 😉

Just wanted to share a quick tip re: number 15 (Google+ Communities). If you go to your page settings and scroll to the very bottom, you’ll see a checkbox that reads, “Show your Google+ communities posts on the Posts tab of your Google+ profile.” Uncheck that, and your community posts won’t show on your profile.

This is really helpful because you can then post the same content wherever, whenever.

Hey Michael, I’ve taken notes and will be working to implement many of these strategies! I have a question for you on #19. I think it’s a great idea to comment on blogs in this manner, but I’m curious as to how you get traffic from it. Can you share a sample of the type of comment you leave? Do you try to leave a link to a specific piece of related content on your site? Do you leave your comment, and include a link to your site after your name? I’ve seen both done and am wondering what you recommend. Thanks!!

I mix and match both types of blog comments. If I’ve got a relevant article on my site, I’ll drop a link to it within the comment. Otherwise I just make my name the anchor text with a link to my home page (since it’s optimized to convert subscribers).

But no matter what, I try to leave in-depth comments that add value to the discussion. Those are the comments that get noticed and spark curiosity in you.

Epic post as always Michael. I’m curious about Quora. I’ve just started doing this myself but I’m finding with my particular topic, while there’s no shortage of questions that are asked, many of them are quite old. Do you only respond to recent questions being asked on Quora or do you still respond to some that are quite old (say 2, 6, 12 months old etc)? Do people still read responses from older questions?

Also do you only respond to threads that have attained a certain amount of views too? Thanks.

I look less at how old a thread is and more at how many people are following it. Since people who are following a question get notified of new answers, if you answer questions with more followers your response will get more exposure.

But you also never know if an answer will eventually have a high number of followers, so if you can answer the question adequately, I would say go for it 🙂